Untranslated

لحاظ بہ

i, woman, voltage. homeless apparition. partitioned fourways: rib, eve, apple, viper.
divined, designed. a wick, a wavering. routed enticements. the strand’s sigh & weave;
this black potentate of hair combed back to its cathedra. the way we learn to bend our
bodies into horned moons; wax fevered to rain from the eclipse of limbs.

النور

a lake, a look. a lack that measures gravity’s coda. pilfered light & the bed-linen in its
own swollen glow. by the books, pear blossoms & a bottle aged out of its messes.
shuffled decks. the high priestess & her hangman. your swan-silk silhouette; that bird on
the branch rescinding in its own prosopopoeia. its new shape resizing your gaze.

منتظر

peripheries as coupled lengths of graceful objections. distance & its plural guests. past,
lassoed, corium. i am announced by the wound in its hourly waiting. beyond this, tongue
dyed in urdu. a country. a compass. a conjuration.

سحر

to separate mourning from its moored is to know where the weather settles between its
memory & your mouth. at dawn, the body as a bowl in the palm of a fire. sheened grey of
rodents wincing loud these funeral tracts of green. ambuscade, orison. prayer as both
bare feet & the briar rose. as time in all of its noisy teeming.

Airport Sutra

it is always the gum-black drop of my eyebrows - afghan
hawkmoth crushed in vine charcoal a line pilfered from

forough's ash-limned chant then, the troubled wonder
of skin it's feathered undertows i can aura the guesswork

of their eyes - that blink & slur - is she one of them, theirs, they
hers? quarantine is a home papered in blue fiction, ripped

teeth of macadam night-sorrowed jasmines a leaf of vark
ironing it’s plenty over the barfi the khansama soaking almonds

for rice puddings. qabbani’s arbor between pewter & teakwood
memory is the worst disease say inshallah & the healing is

hot wax trying to fuse two apologies into a single bone. dear
ghalib, i too am the report of my own fracture. if she were alive

my grandmother would ask of me a dire grace would ask
i grow my hair to rival the dark knotted length of our Time

ask that the heart best be worn as an amulet wrapped
in a language i still can't read but sing more & more of
with each passing death

Scherezade Siobhan is an Indo-Roma social scientist, community catalyst and hack scribbler of three poetry collections—Bone, Tongue (Though Catalog Books, 2015), Father, Husband (Salopress, 2016), The Bluest Kali (Lithic Press, 2018)—and one poetry pamphlet, to dhikr, i (Pyramid Editions, Forthcoming). She is the creator and curator of “The Mira Project,” a global, cross-cultural dialogue which uses expressive art and storytelling to dismantle gendered violence and street harassment. In 2016, she founded Geniette, a unique, crowdsourced platform for women and women-run businesses to engage and empower each other. She can be found squeeing bout militant bunnies at www.zaharaesque.com or twitter.com/zaharaesque.